As we move closer and closer toward vocal translation apps, we are moving toward the Star Trek idea of a universal translator. A few months ago we had a visiting scholar and his family from china stay with us. We were getting by with Google Translate, but I remember seeing a news story of a developing app that could translate conversation in real time.
Today, the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) began in San Jose, California. One of the headlines was the development of screen capable of 1 billion colors. I do not think I can see differentiation of the colors we have now. For what reasons would anyone really need a billion colors. My usual reaction would be to google it. Before I went to the net I thought about a visual data stream. This could be used as a universal translator for any verbal or symbolic language we have.
With some languages having 50,000 symbols, words, or logo-grams, 1 billion colors could contain more than 20,000 languages. There are always linguistic issue beyond simple words, but this has the ability to organize the data involved in language.
There are under 800,000 words in the Bible. Take in numbers, periods, and other symbols other than words and you have somewhere around 1,000,000 symbols. Today we have bar and QR scanners to transmit data. With this storage, the complete Bible could be a 1,000 by 1,000 pixel image.
The first part of the data would be all words/symbols/logo-grams (dog, tree, run, etc.) that exist in all languages. Open space at the end would allow for new names, ideas, words that might come along. Further on the data would add, one language at a time, all words of each language.
When I use Photoshop, I use colors coded by the Hexadecimal identifiers. These go from ffffff – white to 000000-black.
As a hypothetical, here is how the definite articles might line up (c15109 – the – English, ff7d00 – 該 – Chinese, 5dd616 – el – Spanish, 00c067 – das – German, 25bf25 – ‘o – Greek, 00ba5b – y – Welsh, 001e9c – de – Dutch).
With this beginning a book could be encoded, transmitted, and decoded for any language the receiver desires. Of course the basics would be database driven and could be done today.